It is, but let’s back up a minute and establish some basics for matter.
“Multi admin” in Matter does NOT mean that a matter - certified device gets automatically added to every matter-compatible platform you have in your home when you add it to one of them. For one thing, you might not want to add it to all platforms.
Instead, multi admin is an architecture definition, which says that the same device can receive matter commands from multiple platforms. Technically, it can be commissioned on more than one platform at a time.
If you’re familiar with the Philips hue hub, that’s how that works. You can add it to Smartthings, to hubitat, to HomeKit, to vera, and it will exchange messages with all of them. It doesn’t care how many platforms it gets added to.
But that just has to do with the messages that are transmitted once everything is set up.
COMISSIONING: adding a new device. 3 methods in Matter
there’s still an initial step, called “commissioning” in matter, which gives the platform information about the device and tells the device that it’s OK to accept communications from that specific platform.
And in most cases, you still have to do that one platform at a time.
comissioning method 1: “manual,” one platform at a time
Most of the time, you will set up a Matter device in the first platform. That platform that has information about the device. Then you go to the second platform and have it request permission to talk to the matter device. That request will go through the original platform. End result: both platforms can talk to the same device. That’s “multi admin control.”
Exactly how the commissioning step happens for the second platform can vary a little bit, but it’s supposed to look exactly the same to the end-user. And most commonly the first platform will generate a QR code for the device that you then just have to scan into the second platform, and everything else happens behind the scenes.
OK, that’s the standard manual process.
comissioning method 2: automatic local discovery
But we already know that some platforms, particularly the voice assistants, can automatically discover some devices if they share the same Network. That’s the “Alexa, discover new devices“ process.
Matter does allow for that option as well for some devices.
comissioning method 3: two companies agree by contract to share their device information
A third method allows for two companies to agree to share their matter information automatically. So far SmartThings has an agreement of this type with Google home, and says it’s working on one with Alexa.
So the two platforms will share the list of matter devices that they already know about and then you select from that list to commission it to the partner platform. You don’t need the individual QR codes.
This is made possible by multi admin control, but it is not itself multi admin control, it’s built on top of that.
(So far the announcements have only mentioned galaxy devices, by the way. )
). I’m more likely to get a ST Station.